INTERVIEW: No One Is Coming to Save You writer Nathan Ellis

Kicking off on 11 June 2018, Breaking Out is a festival of world premiere shows by emerging theatre companies, chosen from over 45 different projects by the artistic team at The Bunker Theatre. One of those shows is No One Is Coming to Save You from This Noise, a new theatre company that tries to find contemporary languages for political action. An experimental duologue about one night in the lives of two people in their early twenties, No One Is Coming to Save You explores youth loneliness, power and powerlessness, and the hope for something better.

“Pretty much every day a new article will come out online about how young people are really unhappy and disappointed with the world and their lives, and that didn’t seem to be being reflected in the work we were seeing onstage, which either ignores young people altogether or is extremely interested in their sex lives,” explains writer Nathan Ellis. “We wanted to be more reflective and talk about how it really feels to be young, and how that feeling that something better is coming is maybe masking a sneaking suspicion that it isn’t.

“We really want to accurately reflect what it feels like to be young right now in both the content and the form of the play. The form of the show has been ambitiously experimental from the beginning. The two performers tell the story of two people, but as the story progresses, the lines between themselves and their stories start to blur. It’s exploring the feeling of being not-quite-in-the-world that seems particularly salient to contemporary experience. If you like Caryl Churchill or Chris Thorpe – plays that demand you think and feel – then you’ll like this.”

Ellis started writing No One Is Coming to Save You in 2016 at a residency in Oxford. “It’s almost unrecognisable from that point, but it’s essentially got the same DNA as that play,” he says. “Since then the company has had a year’s worth of workshops and scratch performances and sharings to bring it to where it is now, and have been really generously supported by Arts Council England. A lot of the play has been collaborative, with lots of discussion with people within and outside the company about its themes – everyone in the company is under 25 – and experiences from their own lives.”

No One Is Coming to Save You is the first production from This Noise, who focus on making theatre by, with, and for young people: “We are made up of a group of interdisciplinary makers across writing, design, and performance and have been Arts Council East funded since 2018,” says Nathan. “We basically think theatre is a great space to talk about how complicated it is to be alive right now, without resorting to simple answers or platitudes. If you’re looking for a formally experimental show that explores how it really feels to be young today – about youth loneliness, mental health, and the terrors of a world not working, then give No One Is Coming to Save You a go.

“Although it deals with serious issues in a complex, challenging way, the play is actually very hopeful. Without spoiling the ending, it’s got a real belief behind it that communal experiences – like sharing space and sharing a story – can really make us feel more connected to each other. Hopefully it will challenge people with a new form and maybe make them smile a bit too. There are some funny bits – promise!”

With a little over two weeks until their first performance as part of Breaking Out, Nathan and the team are looking forward to bringing their work to The Bunker. “This Noise are unbelievably excited about Breaking Out. It’s so exciting to be part of such a vibrant season of other work by emerging companies. Particularly as a company exploring how it feels to be young, it will be so great to see where their work has taken them and to see the pieces in conversation with each other. We’ve been in love with the Bunker since it opened and always wanted to perform the show there. It already has such a history of supporting complicated, experimental work that would otherwise not get a platform in London. It’s such a versatile space and one that has a real atmosphere and engaged audience, who we think will really appreciate the challenge of a show like No One Is Coming to Save You.”

No One Is Coming to Save You is at The Bunker Theatre on Tuesdays and Fridays at 7pm from 11th June-7th July.

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A lifelong fan who's always been far more comfortable watching theatre than making it, Liz Dyer fell into blogging very much by accident after joining the blog team at London Theatre Direct. From there, she began reviewing regularly for LondonTheatre1.com and (fellow Mate) Carn's Theatre Passion, before setting up her own site Theatre Things in 2015 to cover shows across London and Kent. She tweets from her blog at @theatrethingsuk and personally at @lizzid82.

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A lifelong fan who's always been far more comfortable watching theatre than making it, Liz Dyer fell into blogging very much by accident after joining the blog team at London Theatre Direct. From there, she began reviewing regularly for LondonTheatre1.com and (fellow Mate) Carn's Theatre Passion, before setting up her own site Theatre Things in 2015 to cover shows across London and Kent. She tweets from her blog at @theatrethingsuk and personally at @lizzid82.